Abstract

Most Distributed Hash Tables (DHTs) simply consider interconnecting homogeneous nodes on the same overlay. However, realistically nodes on a network are heterogeneous in terms of their capabilities. Because of this, traditional DHTs have been shown to exhibit poor performance in a real-world environment. Additionally, we believe that it is this approach that contributes to a limited exploitation of peer-to-peer technologies. Previous work on super-peers in DHTs was proposed to address these performance issues, however the strategy used is often based on locally clustering peers around individual super-peers. This method of superpeering, however, compromises fundamental features such as load-balancing, resilience and routing efficiency, which traditional DHTs originally promised to offer. We propose a Stealth DHT which addresses the deficiencies of previous super-peer approaches by using the DHT algorithm itself to select the most appropriate super-peer for each message sent by peers. Through simulations and measurements, we show the fitness for purpose of our proposal.